Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

September 2024 begins with a pair of disappointing developments regarding two ’90s dramas that mean a lot to me. Last month, I said how fond I was of the first four seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street, the use of Belly’s “Full Moon, Empty Heart” in Homicide‘s “Every Mother’s Son” episode, and the use of Tom Waits’s “Cold, Cold Ground” in Homicide‘s “Bad Medicine” episode.

According to fans in the Homicide subreddit, both “Full Moon, Empty Heart” and “Cold, Cold Ground” are among the many songs that have been replaced by NBCUniversal in the streaming version of the series. In that subreddit, several fans are already talking about restoring the missing songs in fan edits they want to make out of the newly remastered episodes, to which I say, “Fucking go for it.”

I’m not watching a single minute of the Peacock version of Homicide because I already have in my physical media collection Shout! Factory’s Homicide complete series box set, which kept “Full Moon, Empty Heart” and “Cold, Cold Ground” intact and is much, much closer to the version of the series as it originally aired on NBC. (The box set also contains the Law & Order episodes that formed the first halves of the original L&O‘s two-part crossovers with Homicide, while Peacock doesn’t carry any of them because it has been unable to secure the streaming rights to the original L&O‘s first 12 seasons.)

“Full Moon, Empty Heart,” which was inspired by a news story Belly frontwoman Tanya Donelly read, is darker than the episode that featured it. It’s about custody battles, filicide, and suicide. The A-story in “Every Mother’s Son,” written by actor Eugene Lee from a story by Homicide showrunner Tom Fontana and staff writer James Yoshimura, is about Mary (played by Gay Thomas) and Patrice (played by the late Rhonda Stubbins White), two Black women who don’t know each other and form a bond while sitting in the waiting room outside Giardello’s squad room, but their bond becomes strained when Mary learns that the murderer of her 13-year-old son is Patrice’s 14-year-old son. (Though it was one of several great “the senselessness of what Pembleton sees on the job takes its toll on him” episodes that showcased the complexity and emotion the late Andre Braugher brought to Pembleton, “Every Mother’s Son” was first and foremost an episode about Mary and Patrice, and it was a terrific example of Homicide—like The Wire later on—humanizing people other cop shows tended to flatly depict or shunt aside.) A version of “Every Mother’s Son” without Donelly’s melodious vocals during both the episode’s big montage and a much shorter montage later on—both nicely assembled by Homicide editor Cindy Mollo—is unfathomable to me.

When David Simon said to the fans that NBCUniversal worked out Homicide‘s music rights issues for the Peacock version, he neglected to mention that a shit-ton of songs have been replaced with generic tunes in key scenes. Music that was erased from favorite TV shows has been a pet peeve of mine ever since the fiasco that was Paramount’s Keen Eddie DVDs. I fucking hate that it’s happening to Homicide.

I blame both the greed of music publishers or record labels and the laziness of corporations that, unlike Shout!, don’t want to put in the work of fighting to restore music in a certain series just because it’s less popular than other IPs they own. NBCUniversal previously put in the work of fighting to keep intact all the music on the original Miami Vice for home video and streaming. But Homicide was never a pop culture juggernaut like Miami Vice was, so when it was Homicide‘s turn to hit streaming, NBCUniversal was like, “Nope, we don’t have time to clear all those songs from… what was it called? Homicide: Death in the Streets? Anyway, let’s look for another Universal horror flick from the ’30s we can turn into a shared universe to compete with the MCU.”

Stick with Shout!’s Homicide DVDs (or cop them). They’re still in print.

Homicide was in production at exactly the same time as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I was a Homicide fan and not a DS9 fan, so I didn’t fully appreciate DS9 until the late 2010s, when I watched its entire run for the first time via Netflix. It’s now my favorite live-action Trek series. One of DS9‘s most popular recurring actors in its later seasons has passed away at 88. To boomers, James Darren—who was interviewed last year by Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating on the now-defunct The Shuttlepod Show—is Moondoggie or Tony on The Time Tunnel. I knew him from T.J. Hooker and DS9.

I found holographic lounge singer Vic Fontaine to be a cornball addition to the show at first—the idea that Rat Pack standards would still be popular in 2374 is such a white boomer thing, and if you asked me who my favorite singer character on DS9 is, I would pick the singing Klingon chef—but when I got to DS9‘s seventh and final season on Netflix, I ended up liking Vic and his Rat Pack tunes, especially when he and Captain Sisko crooned “The Best Is Yet to Come” together. You can tell this role, which allowed Darren, a pop star in the ’60s, to revisit his past with the Rat Pack, meant the world to him. Darren was perfect in the most powerful scene from my favorite seventh-season DS9 episode, “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” It’s a bummer that too many Homicide alums are now dead. Or that nobody from the Mary Tyler Moore Show cast is alive anymore. Or that nobody from the Bob Newhart Show cast (except Peter Bonerz) is alive anymore. Or that the two actors who elevated the scene where Vic compassionately says to a traumatized Nog, “You stay here, you’re going to die. Not all at once, but little by little. Eventually, you’ll become as hollow as I am,” are now no longer with us.

September 8 is Star Trek Day, CBS Studios’s annual celebration of the September 8, 1966 NBC premiere of the series that led to DS9 and before that, DS9‘s parent series. (The most awkward part of Star Trek Day is always when CBS acts as if NBC is chopped liver. NBC was home to both the first Trek series and the Filmation revival.) Star Trek Day is why the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “The Aquathawn” from the 2022 Star Trek: Prodigy episode “Asylum.” The rousing piece was composed by Prodigy and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds composer Nami Melumad, the Trek franchise’s first female composer. She’s a great addition to the franchise.

I had zero interest in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. It’s been done before as a Marvel comic of the same name and an IDW miniseries of the same name. The Protostar and the Voyager-A on Prodigy are basically Starfleet Academy without the classrooms or the sex. But then the addition of Star Trek: Lower Decks lead Tawny Newsome to the writers’ room, the casting of Holly Hunter, Paul Giamatti, and Gina Yashere, and the return of Tig Notaro, Robert Picardo, Mary Wiseman, and Oded Fehr raised my interest in Starfleet Academy.

Also in the works is a live-action Trek comedy series that was created by Newsome and another Black Trekkie, Dear White People director Justin Simien, who admired Geordi La Forge when he was a kid and wrote a flashback to Lionel cosplaying as La Forge at a Halloween dance in high school in the first season of the TV version of Dear White People. Newsome and Simien’s creation will center on Federation outsiders who run a resort planet and find out their day-to-day exploits are being broadcast to the entire quadrant. Simien has said that the DS9 episodes “where you had time to hang out with Quark for a second” and “those episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation where it wasn’t plot-heavy” inspired his project with Newsome.

Because I’m fond of a lot of Trek courtroom episodes, I think the next Trek series after Starfleet Academy and the untitled Newsome/Simien project should be a sci-fi legal drama like the short-lived Century City. The perfect lead actor would be Jack Quaid, who ought to reprise his role as Boimler. The purple-haired lower decker from Modesto has proven a few times on Lower Decks that if Starfleet doesn’t work out for him, he has a future as the next Sam Cogley.

The placement of a character from a half-hour comedy in an hour-long drama worked before (Lou Grant), and it will work again because if anyone can pull it off, it’s definitely Quaid. This leads me to today’s prompt: What’s a favorite “comedy that was spun off from an hour-long drama” of yours? One of the most hated examples of this was 1991’s Pros & Cons, which starred James Earl Jones and Richard Crenna.

Right before Pros & Cons debuted, Jones won an Emmy for starring as Gabriel Bird, a brooding investigator for wealthy lawyer Victoria Heller (played by Laila Robins, one of the highlights of The Boys as Boys founder Grace Mallory), on Gabriel’s Fire, whose pilot, which has been posted in its entirety on YouTube, is the only episode of the series I’ve watched. Gabriel’s Fire had a great premise: What if there was a 1969 Chicago police raid much like the ’69 raid where Fred Hampton was assassinated? And what if the raid ended with a Black cop protecting an innocent Black woman and her kid from his white partner, who was about to shoot the mother down, by killing him? And what if that cop, who received a life sentence for killing his partner, was released from prison 20 years later due to a writ of habeas corpus, but he’s not exactly jubilant about his newfound freedom, and he struggles to adjust to a world that changed while he was doing time?

The pilot’s most memorable scene is a wonderfully acted bit where Gabriel enjoys his first Chicago hot dog in 20 years. (He orders it with ketchup, which pilot writers Coleman Luck and Jacqueline Zambrano didn’t know is a crime in Chicago—as evidenced by the unconvincing moment where the hot dog vendor isn’t appalled by Gabriel’s request for ketchup—and ketchup on a hot dog should be a crime everywhere.) But outside of that lighthearted hot dog scene and a moment where a tense argument between Gabriel and Victoria in her limo collapses into laughter from both of them, Gabriel’s Fire was a heavy show. Though it was a critics’ darling, it failed to draw viewers on ABC and was on the bubble. But ABC wanted more of Jones as Gabriel, so Gabriel’s Fire was extinguished, and Jones and Madge Sinclair, who also won an Emmy for her role as “Empress” Josephine Austin, Gabriel’s landlady, were spun off into an hour-long buddy comedy, Pros & Cons, where Gabriel married Josephine, moved to L.A., and joined forces with a more relaxed P.I. played by Crenna. That other show was not a critics’ darling. Everything that was unique about Gabriel’s Fire was gone, and none of the viewers who liked Gabriel’s Fire were interested in a kinder, gentler Gabriel, so Pros & Cons had an even shorter run than the original show.

Okay, I’ll go first: My favorite comedies that were spun off from hour-long dramas are Lower Decks and The Good Fight.

The Good Fight was a better show than the more somber The Good Wife. And I didn’t have to ever see Julianna Margulies‘s racist face or Chris Noth’s rapey face.